Rules For Radical CIOs: Part 2

How do Saul Alinsky's rules for activists apply to tech executives? Let us keep counting the ways.

In part one of this two-part series, I laid out the first five of activist Saul Allinky's "Rules for Radicals," changing them slightly to apply to competitors and the business of technology. In this installment I cover rules six through 13.

Rule 6: A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.

This notion is deceptively simple, so I'll focus on a corollary: You need to deepen your relationship with your people. Because you can't know what your people enjoy unless you know your people, unless you get past the tidbits of self-serving associations you make with your two-, three- and four-downs (Bob -- infrastructure, two kids; Priya -- content management, skier; Steve -- governance, alcoholic).

Plenty of management books talk about the importance of listening. But how many broach the topic of caring?

That's the difference between you and that nun at the soup kitchen: You both listen; she cares. And because of that she's a better organizer, probably a better leader and definitely less of a waste of space.

You already know this paragraph but read it anyway. Get to know your people. Have "skip-level" conversations regularly. Flatten your org. The higher up you are in the command, the more valuable your frontline connections will be. Truth gets lost as it travels up the communications chain.

And for God's sake, don't let your handlers treat you like some time-constrained celebrity. How meaningless and demotivating are those forced early-morning breakfast sessions we've all experienced where a dozen "up-and-comers" get to spend an hour eating eggs with the C-level? I can hear your handlers as they whisk you away to your next meeting. "That went really well." "Our employee satisfaction surveys tell us we should have more of these."

What did you ask in those surveys: "Who likes eating eggs?"

Let's keep this simple. If you're not spending a quarter of your time building and strengthening relationships in one-on-ones with people other than your directs, quit your job and join a convent.

Rule 7: A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.

An avalanche takes anywhere from a few seconds to a minute and a half. As the snow travels downhill, the larger pieces of slab disintegrate into increasingly smaller fragments. If the fragments become small enough, the snow takes on the characteristics of a fluid.

If you're the Yeti who started the avalanche -- or you aspire to be -- you understand implicitly that that fluid state is the aspiration of any social movement, any growing business and (slightly less ambitiously) any IT project.

It is this avalanche principle -- start small and simple and then incrementally grow size and complexity -- that IT project managers should learn from community organizing. It's the psychological underpinning of two of today's most popular methodologies: Eric Reis's lean approach (build-measure-learn) and Steven Blank's focus on minimum viable product.

Projects that start small and divide their deliverables into pieces that don't "drag on too long" better position teams for success. They build confidence through an avalanche of small, visible wins. And that confidence lets the project leader increase the complexity of the deliverables incrementally.

Cleaning graffiti, for instance, kicks off exactly this kind of empowerment cycle. It starts with the powerless, folks who would never imagine challenging "the man." And it gives them a way to achieve small visible victories (i.e., a cleaner, more beautiful, pride-inspiring neighborhood). Organizers then leverage that small burst of confidence into bigger, more complex wins, facilitating an avalanche of community- and confidence-building that ends with an empowered team that successfully challenges City Hall. After that, it's just rinse and repeat to create habits of empowerment.

Before you write off this approach as leftist garbage, think about how powerless most employees feel in large corporate bureaucracies; how perfectly Martin Seligman's description of learned helplessness describes the cubicled masses. It'll hopefully inspire you to follow:

Rule 8: Keep the pressure on.

I'm not a big fan of the Tea Party, a political movement with all the charm and warmth of John Wayne Gacy's clown photo. But they do have one redeeming quality: They are unrelenting.

And even though the Tea Party's leaders equate Alinsky with Lucifer, they use the same book of rules: They keep the pressure on by changing tactics regularly and inserting themselves into every news cycle. How does this translate to technology and leadership? Two words: burning platform. Three more words: You need one.

Re #11, pushing a negative, cloud might qualify. The IT status-quo types screamed loud enough about security to drown out the reality that Amazon & RackSpace most likely have better infosec teams than 90% of the haters. Lorna Garey, IW

Eric R.'s last name is spelled the same as mine: Ries. Mind you, he's probably as used to misspellings and mispronunciations as I am.

Now for your concluding statement:

I agree that scale is a problem. We've become a nation of servants and are well on our way to becoming a world of servants. Few can hope to really be their own bosses, which tends to give us a lot less sympathy for our bosses than we would have if we had a realistic hope of filling their shoes. And those bosses who really are socipaths don't have to worry as much about their employees walking away as they would if it were easy for one to start one's own business.

But the big problems are:

1. Too many people have trained themselves to turn off their consciences when they become inconvenient (especially in the workplace). While we all do this to an extent, we don't have to and shouldn't rationalize it. It's a lot easier for evil to prevail if good people won't sacrifice to do the right thing.

2. We frequently forget that while we have no real control and only limited influence over the behavior of others, we have (or can have) a very high degree of control over our own actions. And we do have influence; mostly over our friends, families, and acquaintances, but we have it nonetheless. How we use that influence is up to us.

3, We forget that the struggle between good and evil mostly goes on within ourselves, not between competing groups or individuals. In nearly every conflict, there are good and bad people on all sides (and everything in between). We all have (at least figurative) angels and devils sitting our our shoulders trying to guide us in one way or the other. Our challenges are first to recognize which is which; then to follow our own better impulses consistently; then to encourage others to do the same.

And as long as we're talking Star Wars, we consider should consider a statement by Yoda in "The Phantom Menace": "Hard to see the dark side is". It's trivially easy to misjudge the motives of others, both good and bad (so be careful).

Coverlet, I completely agree with the idea that work should not suck as much as it does. There has got to be a better way. I pray that you find such a way. The cubicle drones (I am one of them) are in favor of your IT strategies and in favor of compassionate leadership and employee enrichment. The sticking point is that like government humanitarian programs, many cubicle dwellers would find ways to take advantage of these work enrichment programs. I know way too many perfectly healthy adults collecting disability checks from the government. These adults work under the table for pay, whilst getting disability checks from the govt. I am all for compassion. But how about verifying that the need is really there.

The global warming (GW) debate is not about warming or not. The debate is about man made causation or not. If government decides that man causes GW, then we will all end up buying carbon offsets from Al Gore, making him rich and me poor and the environment no better than it is.

The Tea Partydoes not inert itself into every conversation. The Tea Party is simply everyday people opining that government $16 trillion debt is unhealthy for the country and places us ever closer to socialism. Socialism has been tried and proven to be afailure. History is very clear about this.

Extreme socialism has been tried and failed, but modern socialism as defined by the Tea Party is alive and well and living in countries with much less poverty, much better health and higher educational and happiness outcomes compared with the U.S. Certainly people game the system - no matter what system we put in place, someone will game it. I've seen people game the system of pulling numbers at the deli counter. But the answer isn't to blow up the system, it's to refine it, often using technology.